S2E10: Unbridled Enthusiasm
“Knock knock!” Twilight Sparkle said at the threshold of Starlight Glimmer’s room. She didn’t actually knock, of course -- the door was already open and she could see Starlight sitting at her desk, leafing through some journal or other from the library’s periodical collection.
“Hey Twilight!” Starlight flipped the journal closed. “What’s up? Need help with something?”
“No, just thought I’d stop by, see how you’re doing.” Twilight stepped into the room and looked around. “Actually, there was one little thing I was hoping you could help with.”
“Of course!” Starlight leapt to her hooves. Her horn lit, and her saddlebags floated from their peg on the wall to her withers. “Where are we going?”
“No, no, not a mission. Just a question.” Twilight pulled a few documents out of her own saddlebags and shuffled them before her. “It’s just, I was going through the castle’s invoices this morning, for the budget meeting next week, and I found something that I thought was a little odd.”
“Oh.” Starlight floated her saddlebags back to the wall. “What’s that?”
“Well, uh.” More shuffling of papers. “This will sound weird and it’s probably nothing and I’ll feel stupid about it like that time I thought you were hitting on my brother but it turned out he just had some lint on his belly and we all had a good laugh about it and it was funny even though it kinda felt like you were all laughing at me but anyway I thought it was important enough to check so here goes—” here she took a breath, “did you by any chance order a premium subscription to www.live-pig-dissections.com?”
“Oh. Oh!” Starlight let out a little half-laugh. “That! Oh, yeah, I could see how that would startle you if you just saw it on an invoice. I’m sorry, Twilight, I should’ve given you some kind of heads-up – it’s not what it sounds like.”
“Heh. Whew! I figured.” Twilight grinned. A weight lifted from her shoulders. Just a little misunderstanding! Foals and their website names these days, all crazy and startling and misleading. “I mean, wouldn’t that be crazy? A website that actually sold videos of live pigs being dissected?”
“Hah! What a nutty idea!” Starlight smiled along with her. “No, it’s nothing like that, Twilight. The videos are live. All the pigs are already dead.”
“The videos…” Twilight stopped and reconsidered her words. “You… you’re serious?”
“Absolutely. All the videos start with a veterinarian certifying that the pig in question shows no signs of life, or its brain and spinal cord have been destroyed. No brain, no pain!”
“No, I mean…” Twilight closed her eyes. “You… you watch videos of pigs being dissected? Ponies makevideos of pigs being dissected?”
“Of course. How else are you supposed to learn about anatomy?”
“Books! From books! You don’t need to, to cut a pig open!”
“How do you think those books got written?” Starlight asked. She sat on her haunches and held up a hoof to forestall Twilight’s response. “Look, you know I love books. But books can’t show you how intercostal muscles expand your ribcage and make you inhale, or the weight of the heart, or how the liver balances the body’s humours.”
Twilight scowled. The shock and disgust bubbling in her gut gave way to something else – indignation, and a little anger besides. “I can’t believe this! Those were living beings! And you just cut them up for your own edification?”
“Well, no, I don’t cut them up. The doctors in the videos do. But you’re correct about the important thing, Twilight: they were living beings. And now they’re dead, and they don’t care what happens to them. Why shouldn’t we at least put their bodies to some good use?”
“Because they’re—” Twilight tried to keep speaking, but had no breath. Hyperventilating, that was it. She closed her eyes and lowered her head below her shoulders, focusing on her breathing. In, out. In, out. In, hold, out. Dimly she was aware of Starlight rubbing her back with a hoof.
“Easy, easy,” Starlight said. “I’m sorry, Twilight. I didn’t realize you felt so strongly about this. I wouldn’t have been so cavalier.”
Twilight took as deep a breath as she could, and let it out a second later. “How can you not feel strongly about it?”
“Hm.” Starlight gaze around the room for a moment before fixing her eyes on the desk. Her horn glowed, and a feathered writing quill lifted from beside her ink pot to float over to them. It hovered in the air, flying again. “You see this quill?”
Twilight nodded. “Uh huh.”
“Did I ever tell you about it?”
Twilight shook her head.
Starlight spun the quill idly as she spoke. Her eyes seemed to look beyond it. “This feather’s name is Ink Scratch. My mom gave her to me years ago, after I won top prize in an essay contest at school. See those little blue dots on the barb? They’re probably just marks from the quill-cutter, but when I was a filly I thought maybe the whole bird this feather came from had those blue spots, and she was a special bird, something beautiful like a peacock, and this feather came to me all the way from some distant land just so I could take notes. And everytime the nib cracked I’ve had her re-cut. Everytime I’ve moved, she’s been the first thing I pack. I saved almost nothing from Our Town, but I have Ink Scratch because I never let her out of my sight. Don’t you think she’s pretty?”
Twilight nodded. The residual anger in her heart had softened as Starlight spoke. “Yeah. You know, I have an ink pot that—”
Starlight snapped the quill in half.
Twilight gasped. “Starlight! What are you—”
“It’s a feather with a nib on it, Twilight,” she said. “I bought it last week from Davenport for three bits. I made all the rest of that up. All I did was break a quill, like you do every week, but because I told you a story about it, you felt bad.”
The broken quill bits floated over to the trashcan and fell, vanishing among crumpled papers and scraps of kite-making materials. Starlight continued: “There’s nothing wrong with dissecting dead animals, Twilight. It’s necessary for us to understand the world. It only feels wrong if you tell yourself a story that makes you feel it’s wrong. So tell a different story.”
Twilight stared at the trashcan. “How… how can you do that? Just… change what you want to believe?”
“Sentimentality is an indulgence, Twilight. Only the comfortable can afford it. Now, come on.” She nuzzled Twilight’s shoulder and helped her stand. “Wanna see how a pig’s lungs work?”
“No!” Of course she didn’t. Why would she want to see that? To see how they adhered to the pleural walls, how the negative pressure of inhalation inflated them, how the diaphragm compressed to expel them. That was… crazy. “Maybe. Okay, yes.”
“Great. Let’s start with this one here…”
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Yes! Now I can finally like and fav these wonderful little marvels with all the gusto I can manage!
Can I show this to PETA?
"Ponies makevideos of pigs"
"Ponies make videos of pigs"?
I don't think that will help very much.
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?
9033714
They do, don't they? I always wondered if it was true.
There are doctors in Equestria. Doesn't Twilight know how they are taught?
And schemes I've seen in text books, for example, are often really bad. Books only recently reached picture quality that may in principle compete with something like that:
fishprint.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/optic-radiation.png
Well, if Starlight wants to blame stories, that view is pretty incomplete: there should be some causal reason outside of her brain that put initial story there and there should be something that will guide how story would be replaced. Looking at the picture above and feeling strongly because that thing was thinking not so long time ago (same for pigs, I guess, since they are semi-sapient in Equestria) is an absolutely correct position that is direct consequence of existence of yet undefeated bad thing in the world. The source of confusion here is that closing eyes and doing nothing will not really make bad things go away.
I like very much how Starlight is genuinely sweet and kind here --- she's kinda a bit of a dick in other chapters (well, maybe, except "Times They Are a Changeling")
Okay this shit is fucked up.
I love it lol
I like how Starlight's mind functions, she's not Lawful Good, she's closer to Chaotic Good if anything.
This is one of the reasons why I like, Starlight! She one of the realist character in the show!
Good job. This story was my interest.
This left me chuckling for fifteen minutes after reading the story. Good show, author.
9039210
I've always thought of Starlight as someone with an impaired sense of right and wrong (technically, I suppose the term for that is psychopath, but it has baggage) trying to learn to be a good person, in the same way someone on the autistic spectrum might try to learn the right ways to interact with other people. She wants to be a good pony, she just sometimes has trouble knowing how.
This isn't unproblematic, but there's much wisdom here. Plus it's great writing.
This only works in the context if the pigs died of natural causes.
The TL;DR version of this is “I’m not here to start anything, I’m reading a story.”
Right. I was going to put off doing this until after the show had ended, but I just a few moments ago read a suicide note from someone I don’t know about an hour after said note was posted and so most likely too late to do a damn thing to try and help him.
So I’m kind of in a mood. I don’t know what mood, exactly, I don’t know what mood is appropriate for reading the suicide note of someone you don’t know and realizing rather starkly that a life has just ended, but not the life of someone you knew until you read the note and realized that the life had ended. But it’s a mood of some variety, and I need to work through it somehow.
So it was this or breaking out my old copy of Resident Evil 4 (GameCube) and going to town on some Ganados, which always me feel better. But the GameCube isn’t hooked up to the TV right now, the Switch and the PS4 are, and it’d be a pain. So, this.
Over the past few months since finishing reading The Last Changeling I’ve been going down the list of prominent other commenters I remembered talking to during that whole actually literal train wreck of a series and reading, and commenting on, some of their stories. I sort of want to understand, try and get a grasp on, other readers’ perspectives of Jaxie’s magnum failpus.
Yeah, I’m using childish nicknames. Like I said, I’m in a suicide-note-induced mood. Indulge me.
Anyway despite the impression I probably just gave I’m not going around screaming at the top of my lungs or anything at people. Horizon’s Time Enough for Love was fantastic, mostly, kind of a bit of a ball drop towards the end when he introduced a man into the Celestia/Nightmare Moon fight that rubbed my Bechdel Test sensibilities the wrong way, but nothing major, it made sense in context. I’m very much enjoying Crack-Fic Kai’s A Heart Forged of Iron, since I love me some comic book superhero goodness and I love me some purplesmart pony and that fic has both of them. I was already enjoying Raugos’ A Tempestuous, Pharyngeal Engagement and how wonderfully yet beneficently manipulative Cadance was in it, and I read “That Changeling’s a Bad OC!” and its prequel stories eagerly and enjoyed the bit of a ruse cruise I was taken on in them. At some point I’m going to get started on FanOfMostEverything’s Oversaturation, although to an extent I’m deliberately avoiding it because I was planning on doing something similar whenever I get to my own take on Equestria Girls and I don’t want to be accused of theft.
The band Smashmouth used to do something similar, they avoided listening to other then-recent music because they didn’t want their own music to sound like anyone else’s.
But anyway, I’ve been meaning to get to one of your fics. Of course you may or may not remember that I posted a comment to Trade War, vis-à-vis my ceaseless need to work a Babylon 5 reference into everything I do. That was a rather short story, though, so my reading it and comment was sort of more a test. See, I know you and Jaxie are close friends, and Jaxie blocked me, so I considered it pretty likely that you might do the same in some sort of show of solidarity or something.
But you didn’t, so here I am.
Oh, by the way, none of the others got this little song-and-dance routine since I don’t know how friendly or not friendly they are with Jaxie and they seemed to have a somewhat more positive opinion of me. Unlike you, who once tried to bludgeon me over the head with Jaxie’s military history credentials and your own, and generally seemed to have a negative opinion of me. So I feel a need to explain myself.
Now, as for why this fic…well, you had a few to choose from. My first thought was actually The Archetypist or The World is Filled with Monsters, since they’re longer. And also, not co-written by Jaxie, whose work I don’t particularly want to read again.
But, then I read a story entitled Sticking Points, by The Hat Man (amusingly, written as part of a writing contest Jaxie was hosting, but I don’t hold that against it). And I was reminded that comedy is hard. I actually think it’s the hardest of the major genres to write for; I have a comment there explaining why (that somehow doesn’t have a Babylon 5 reference in it. Must have been having an off day). As well, while Jaxie may have written some of the chapters in this, you’re the one who published them, i.e., they met with your approval. You didn’t write them but you do agree with them, at least enough to have them posted on a story your published.
So basically if I’m going to find insight into why you like The Last Changeling anywhere, it’s probably going to be here, somewhere.
So, a few rules for myself.
1) I’m only responding to the chapters, not to any comments in the chapters. In fact I’ll ignore the comments section completely.
2) I’ve decided to do them all at once rather than chapter by chapter. So that’s why your Notifiactions was suddenly on fire.
3) I’m going to do my best to mentally divorce Jaxie from the chapters he wrote.
4) This post is exactly 1,000 words long, and that’s quite a lot to read, so I’m limiting myself to 500 words or less per post for each post going forward.
5) I imagine Jaxie checks back in on this regularly, so it’s not like I can hide that I’m here. You’re of course free to tell him, though.
Right, now then, with all that said…let us begin.
And somehow this is instantly relevant to what prompted me to start reading this in the first place, vis-à-vis Starlight’s fake quill story and how I feel about reading the suicide note of someone I’ve never met or even was really aware of before. Spooky.
In any event. I suppose the comedy of this chapter might not be hitting me due to the whole suicide thing. Mostly what confuses me is Twilight somehow doesn’t ask the immediately most relevant question.
“Why do you watch videos of pigs being dissected?”
Like, Starlight is absolutely right in her reasoning and there really isn’t anything wrong with it. But I feel like it’s sort of an important question to be answered. Context is King, as the saying goes, and how okay or not okay it is for Starlight to be watching these videos changes based on if it’s…
1) She was just honestly curious;
2) It’s part of some kind of study or paper or something that she’s putting together
3) There is nothing more satisfying than the rush she gets when looking at flesh being cut into.
One of these things is not like the other,
One of these things just doesn’t belong!
Can you tell me which of these is not like the other
Before I finish singing this song?
First, I love this. I'm a bit of a science geek, and I fully understand the need for medical knowledge that comes from dissections, and I agree that if they are dead, using their bodies to further our knowledge is fine.
Now, with that out of the way, there's no way this could make a TV-Y rated show. :-)
We do see here that Twilight has an ... innocence (?) about her, that Starlight does not. And ...
And part of me wonders: Why does Starlight want to see the insides of pigs like this? Does she actually have an interest in biology, like a minor in anatomy? Or ... does she have plans? :-)
I'm curious about the 'live' part, as it implies the point of the website is to provide a steady stream of all-new videos of pigs being dissected. Even granting that looking at the insides of a pig requires cutting it open (which in Equestria really shouldn't be an automatic given) and that biology and medical science still require knowledge about the insides of pigs (more plausible, although I'd expect knowing how life works to be less innately coupled to medicine), which together imply there will in fact be at least a trickle of new doctors cutting into pigs... some videos are honestly going to be more valuable than others, and there's a limit to how many videos a watcher can really learn anything new from.
Presuming these videos are actually of medical students doing their pig dissections. If this is a website offering premium subscriptions, I'd be worried about the "food channel effect"; since (as far as I know) I just now named it, the reference is to the similar problem of there really only being so many shows and episodes that can be made and watched about basic and useful cooking, and thus the need to create slowly-more-bizarre premises for new shows to keep both supply and demand above their natural levels.
Possible the Internet and videos are new enough in this Equestria we can afford not to be cynical, of course.
Empathy may be expensive, but so is food and water, and we can't live without those either.